Original Guitar Designs

So some months ago the SUSTAIN magazine (you can download here the issue #1) opened a guitar design contest. The prize would be to give life to your guitar, basically. Anyways I sent mine months ago, and the guitar for march never came out, so I wonder what went wrong with the magazine board. Did they quit? Are they just really busy building guitars? I wrote them an email asking what was going on, and as soon as I get an answer I will let you guys know what's really happening.

here are my guitar designs.

What are you waiting? Go create yours now ,)

The Ibanez RGR465 gets Floyd Rose Special!

So, not two weeks are past since i bought this guitar and i'm starting to believe the ones (everybody basically) that said that the Edge tremolo in the rgr465 is crap. I disassembled it completely to the last piece.








It's a complex tremolo well built and designed, to me, much better than a floyd rose... but does it keep your strings in tune? hum, not exactly, the thing is, they are in tune, but after you use the tremolo, if you ended with a bar pull, than all the strings will be pitched up, and the reverse too, so it will be in tune itself, but if you're playing with someone, or along some music, you'll notice something doesn't sound so right  anymore. I had the Original Floyd Rose Special (OFRS) waiting to be tried, and i haven't seen anyone who attemted this, so i switched the tremolo.

This is how it looks --->

as you can see, the routing isn't perfect but everything else is fine. 

Also I had to keep the ibanez studs, because they are slimmer, but they hold up pretty well. There's a bit of play in them, but so in the OFRS

The locking nut are exact copies! you can switch them or switch only the screws.

So, the tremolo seems to be built in a high quality stell, and its well designed, so i dont understand what causing this unstability. I'm gonna switch the springs now (the original ones are crap too), and see how it behaves. Another thins I forgot to mention, is that if you set the saddle farther back as possible for intonation purposes, than the routing is to enough for the string locking screw to go "inside" the guitar. Also one cool feature about the ibanez is that you can put the arm on top, and install this in a left hand guitar, but you'll have to drill the metal plate that covers the hole. Both weight about the same.

Paul Gilbert Technical Dificulties Sheet Tabs

Here are the very hard to find Paul Gilbert Technical Difficulties Sheet Tabs from guitar techniques magazine Jul 2007. So hard to find, that actually this version is the only i found and it seems to be pictures that someone took to the magazine, the text is pretty hard to read but the tabs are all there. As a complementary video you can watch this fellow (and a jolly good player) here explaining step by step.

TABS DOWNLOAD LINK 

Ibanez RGR465M CA

So I recently acquired this beautiful Ibanez RGR465 CandyApple. I was never an Ibanez fan to be honest. The name sounded to spanish cheap replica guitars, but over the years, watching Petrucci (long time ago when he didn't look like a fat homeless virtuoso), Vai, Reb Beach and ultimately  the guitar god Paul Gilbert, made me look at these guitars with other eyes. To the point that I told to myself, I gotta try that neck! Always heard amazing things about Ibanez necks! This one has a wizzard II incarnation  and I must say, I'm very pleased with it so far. And also with everything else. Ibanez is not that bad at all, and I only tried under-a-grand Ibanez... Could I tell the difference if I tried a Prestige?

The neck is 3 parts maple with maple fretboard and some kind of plastic (I guess) dot inlays.
I actually prefer the reverse headstock, and the tuners are ibanez, probably the cheapest, but they are pretty sturdy and do their work well, although with a locking nut, you don't really need €100 machine heads. I thought about some other upgrades. I heard terrible things about the tremolo bridge Edge III, and so I thought about changing it immediately  but when I got the guitar, it looked rather good. I heard Gotoh makes all Ibanez tremolos, but I don't know if that's really true. I had a Floyd Rose Special ready to install, but so far the Edge III behaved really good, so I'm still not sure if I should just leave it. The routing is perfect for an original FR, I heard they even got sewed for that, but the studs look smaller, so I dont know if it will  be a direct swap yet. the pickups are pretty much perfect for now, two Dimarzio with configurations that I dont seem to find anywhere. I'm pretty sure it sounds like this:

5 way selector starting from all the way up:
Pos1 - neck humbucker
Pos2 - neck humbucker paralel wired
Pos3 - both humbuckers
Pos4 - bridge single coil with neck single coil
Pos5 - bridge humbucker

This is made in Indonesia, and its allright, some things are not perfect, like for example the cavity routing for the back plastic covers someplaces is deeper than around half mm. The tone knob needed screwing. The plug in is TIGHT! I dont know if thats good or bad, but if your cable gets pulled by accident, its really unlikely that it will come off. The tremolo is well designed and looks like its made of good quality steel, I see no reason for it to be more unstable than other ibanez tuners. I want to get some plastic knobs, 80's style, but the ones that came are also quite good, for swells and everything.

Guthrie Govan has a new axe!

He left his Suhr endorsement, and is now playing this beautiful Charvel super-strat